Today’s SMH reprints a piece from the Guardian by uber-leftie John Laughland, who is very cross that Ukraine now has a democratically elected government.
Is there such a dearth of good opinion writers in Australia that our quality press needs to reprint loopy conspiracy theorists from the Guardian? With a record of defending Milosovic, arguing that there’s nothing to worry about in Darfur, and putting inverted commas around the word genocide when talking about Rwanda, Laughland is hardly a bloke we should be taking seriously.
Andrew Leigh's Archived Blog 2004-2010 
I’d never though of this joke of a Laughland pundit as an unreconstructed Stalinist. I thought all those “useful idiots” were pretty close to extinct. I thought he was some sort of PR guru for the totalitarians, a “Comical Ali” for the post-Soviet dictatorships.
When I saw his articles in various papers on Ukraine I really couldn’t come up with an explanation why anyone would be a mouthpiece for the revolting regimes of Mugabe, Milosevic, Karimov. It never occured to me that he might old “prehistoric” left. On Crooked Timber I remember one respondent in the discussion trying to pigeon-whole him as “some form of freewheeling state-sovereignty anti-interventionist type: perhaps a bit like the Cato Institute people.”
Whatever the case you are correct that there are better writers of international affairs that could have been commissioned. Re: Ukraine for balanced discusion you probably could have commisioned a piece from someone from the 30-5% of people who supported Yanukovich to explain the basis of his political support amongst the miners focused in Donetsk. Much better than printing this barking idiot.